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“Sure, what is it?” I said and turned my desk chair around to face the bed where she sat down.
“It’s about your father, I wasn’t entirely truthful,” she said, her eyes narrowing as she seemingly struggled to keep her emotions in check.
“What about him?” I asked.
“About the money,” she said. “And about how I met him.”
“Okay,” I replied slowly. I wanted to know what she was going to tell me, but I also braced for the worst of it.
“I met him when I was a dancer,” she said. “I wasn’t lying about being a model, but it didn’t pay enough to cover my rent so I danced on the weekends.”
“Like dancing on a pole?” I asked, and I had a completely different picture of my mother in my head now, but oddly enough, I admired this version more.
“Yes, on a pole. I was good at it, too,” she said. “He came in for a bachelor party with one of his friends and he just started coming back after that. He would spend five thousand a night just to keep me in the private room and talk.”
Her eyes misted over, like she was going to cry but instead she got a faraway dreamy look and continued.
“He told me all about his life, and I told him about mine. We never even had sex, you know,” she said, and then she seemed to remember where she was and her eyes flitted to me. “I mean at the club. Of course we did, eventually.”
“Ew, okay, I know that,” I said. “I don’t need deets.”
She laughed, “Of course not. But he took me out and we started dating. After a while, he asked me to stop dancing and I did. And that’s how we wound up together, it wasn’t at a party, technically.”
“That’s it, then?” I asked, lifting my brow. “That’s not such a big deal.”
“No, that’s not all,” she said and took a deep breath. Her hands fluttered nervously in her lap and she picked at her thumbnail like she did when she was anxious about something. “I stole from him. That’s why we left. He didn’t leave us, we left him.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “What did you steal?”
“Money,” she said. “I was scared and your grandma convinced me he was going to leave because he was spending more and more time with his family. Doing their business and ignoring us. I was alone in the penthouse all the time and I was so lonely, it was just me and you.”
“Why did you take money?” I asked.
“It was easy to do. It was right there,” she said, and she sounded sad. I wondered if she’d ever stopped loving my father and realized she probably never had. “The safe was open. I was allowed to spend as much as I wanted to keep the household going. He never told me no.”
“How much did you take?” I asked.
“Two hundred thousand,” she said. “All in hundreds, in a case. We drove back to your grandparents and he came looking for us a month later.”
“Did you give him the money back?” I asked. “Did he ask for custody?”
“No,” she said and her eyes dropped to the floor. Her shame was palpable, I could feel it radiate off her like heat from the sun. “He asked for us to come home with him. But I’d already spent so much of the money on your grandparents and your uncle, and I was too scared he would be furious with me. We fought about it when he begged me and I turned him down, finally he drove away. He didn’t stop calling, though, not until I told him I was moving in with Reg.”
“So you stole from him and then took me away?” I asked, and a spark of anger flamed inside my chest. “Did you know what Reg was doing to me over the years? Is that why you feel so guilty?”
“What was he doing?” she asked, and she seemed genuinely confused. I couldn’t be sure, though, she might have just been lying to herself long enough that she believed she hadn’t seen it happening under her nose.
“He was drugging me and raping me, Mom,” I blurted. There was no point sugar coating it by now. It had to come out, and I chose to tear the band aid off no matter how hard it hurt. “He would do it every time you left with Nat, and I’m the one who shot him. But I feel like you knew that. You knew it was me all along, didn’t you?”
She looked me in the eye then and she whispered, “I thought it might be. I didn’t know why, though, you have to believe me. I had no idea that was happening to you! Please believe me!”
“I don’t know if I do,” I said. “I don’t know what to believe anymore. My entire life feels like it’s been a lie built on a foundation of deception.”
“What can I do to prove myself to you?” she asked, and her face was filled with longing and hope. “Can we talk about it, please?”
I shut her down, though. I looked at her with a stony gaze and said, “No. I don’t know if I’ll ever talk about it with you. I don’t know if you deserve to hear me open up about anything.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, the tears in her eyes making them glitter. “I need you to forgive me, please.”
